'Yankee Tavern' examines theories surrounding 9/11

It's easy to get tangled up in the various 9/11 coincidences and conspiracies advanced by the characters in “Yankee Tavern,” Steven Dietz's taut, tantalizing thriller in its Chicago-area premiere at American Blues Theater.

I myself lost the thread during the second act of this clever and, at times, humorous examination of alleged government plots and cover-ups related to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it doesn't matter. Because “Yankee Tavern” isn't about uncovering the truth, or some facsimile of it. Not entirely. It's about four grieving people struggling to come to terms with the void in their lives — a void as cavernous as the gaping hole where the twin towers stood, as big as the gash in the Pentagon wall and as great as the crater in the field near Shanksville, Penn.

We meet them in 2006, five years after the terror attacks, in a rundown New York City bar (realistically realized by designer Grant Sabin). It's owned by graduate student Adam (St. Charles native Ian Paul Custer), who inherited the Yankee Tavern and the long-vacant hotel above it from his late father. The entire building is marked for demolition, which is imminent if the grimy windows, dirty floor, broken jukebox and absence of paying customers are any indication. Besides Adam and his fiancé, Janet (Darci Nalepa, of Elk Grove Village, in a first-rate performance), the bar's only other patron is Ray, best friend of Adam's father. A garrulous, genially opinionated conspiracy theorist and self-described “itinerant homesteader,” Ray — enthusiastically played by the wry, crusty Richard Cotovsky — spends his time ranting about the government and corporate conspiracies he believes are behind such history-making events as the moon landing, the 2000 presidential election, 1980's “Miracle on Ice” and the John F. Kennedy assassination, which he describes as “the mother of all conspiracies.”

“An entire nation is led to believe something completely different than that which they have seen for themselves ... From that moment on, this country would never again trust its own eyes and ears,” says Ray.

Much of Ray's paranoia — expressed so eloquently it's almost convincing — centers on Sept. 11, which he insists government operatives engineered to prop up a foundering president.

Deeply distrustful and desperate to comprehend the incomprehensible, Ray is like many of us — parsing myths, theories, rumors and tall tales to get at the “truth.” Terrible as it is to think people we elected to serve and protect would deceive and betray us, it's perhaps even harder to accept that fate is so arbitrary that, on a sunny day in September, 19 terrorists were able to slip through the cracks and murder 3,000 people.

That said, it's no surprise Ray embraces conspiracy theories as a way of imposing order on chaos or assuaging a broken heart. The same can be said of Palmer (played with uneasy understatement by Steve Key), a nondescript newcomer who orders two beers, one for himself and one for an absent friend. Palmer not only shares Ray's skepticism over the official 9/11 explanation, he may have information that supports it. Moreover, he knows things about Adam even Janet doesn't suspect.

Director Joanie Schultz masterfully maintains an underlying sense of dread and apprehension, which escalates in the second act during a chilling, terrifically acted confrontation between Janet and Palmer where the mysterious stranger literally backs the increasingly dubious bride-to-be into a corner.

Schultz and her cast do a nice job keeping us off balance, teetering between what we know and what we're willing to consider.

Custer brings an everyman amiability to Adam, a young man who acknowledges the damage myths inflict, but still refuses to let go of the ones he's created. There's nothing extraneous about Nalepa's performance as the empathetic, accommodating Janet. It's lean, contained and entirely convincing. As for the seasoned Cotovsky, the longtime Chicago storefront veteran gets some of the best lines and makes the most of them. Unfortunately, he struggles with some of the dialogue, and those stumbles jerk us out of the action.

Still, “Yankee Tavern” is worth a look. Even if you don't buy into the theories these characters try to sell, the ride is definitely entertaining.